But these services do break, and when they do break, often times you don't even get a useful error or log file to grep. Sometimes I just really wish I could SSH

But these services do break, and when they do break, often times you don't even get a useful error or log file to grep. Sometimes I just really wish I could SSH into a box to figure out what the hell is going on. You're gaining an expertise, but instead of it being with the underlying technology, it's with the management services for that technology. I think the premise of your argument is correct that understanding these services is simpler than the technology itself, but I seem to inevitably find myself in some edge use case of the service that is poorly documented or does not work as described, and trolling stack overflow or AWS developer forums is the only solution other than trial and (no) error. Let me tell you: it's not fun when you're entrenched into a proprietary service that is now outdated and kept only for legacy reasons, and the version you are on doesn't allow you to do things like update your programming language to a more recent version. Now you get to move to another managed service and lose all that expert knowledge you had with the old one.